One night, the breeze having become light, we proceeded under a cloud
of sail. It was a night such as you rarely find anywhere but in the
tropics. The four scintillating stars of the Southern Cross twinkled
merrily down upon us. Our sails were full, and the waves murmured
past our bow. The sky was a gorgeous spread of blinking stars, and
Old Man Moon was so bright that he seemed to be laughing and
chuckling. The buccaneer's deck was crowded. We sat around in
genial fraternity, officers, prisoners, and crew, each with a goblet
of champagne. Midship was the orchestra, violin, 'cello, melodeon,
and Steinway grand. Perhaps it was the spell of the tropic night,
but as I paced the quarter-deck it seemed to me that they played as
well as the musicians at the Stadt Opera in Berlin.
"Oh, lovely south wind, blow." The melody drifted along on the wind
of the Southern ocean.
How remote the war seemed then! The day was not far when we would be
shipwrecked, but to-night all thought of what might be our fate was
wafted away by the spell of the music, the champagne, and the poetry
of night beneath the tropic stars.
"What ho, a light!"
My night telescope at my eye, I saw a ship. On the horizon, brightly
outlined by the light of the moon, stood a stately three-master.
"Hard aport!" We were on the dark side of the horizon, and she could
not see us. After a bit of scrutiny as we approached her, we guessed
her to be an enemy ship.
Our flash signal flared out across the water. "Heave to--a German
cruiser." Unable to make us out, she little guessed that we were
nothing more than a sailing ship, from which she could easily escape
by slipping through the night. We were confident she would take us
for an armoured cruiser easily able to catch her and blow her out of
the sea with a broadside.
We waited at the rail to see what would happen. Presently, we heard
a splashing of oars. Out of the darkness came a hail, the jolliest
hail I have ever listened to. It was in nasal seaport French.
"What a relief! Instead of a Boche cruiser, I find you are an old
windjammer like ourselves. But why the joke? Your signal fooled us
completely. I suppose you want to tell us something about the war."
I did not wonder at his surmise. Ships long at sea, particularly
Allied ships, were always keen about news from the various battle
fronts, and it was common enough for vessels to stop and exchange
news.
"Come on aboard," I replied. "We have lots of news."
We were in our shirt sleeves, and looked like ordinary seamen. On
deck he said proudly:
"I am a Frenchman." As though we couldn't have guessed it.
"A Frenchman? Fine. How is France doing?"
"Ah! France, she is victorious, or will be very soon. _Ravi de vous
voir_."
He fairly bubbled over with delight when we offered him a bottle of
champagne. Being homeward bound, he was in a frolicsome mood. A
generous taste of the champagne, and he was ready to embrace us. He
thought our supposed joke, which certainly would have been somewhat
cruel, was the result of our being tipsy. He slapped me on the back,
as one cheery skipper to another.
"Captain, what a terrible fellow you are to have fooled me like that.
But now I feel as though a stone had dropped from my heart."
"Beware," I thought, "that your stone does not come back twice as
heavy."
He was such a cheery, convivial soul that I hated to break the bad
news to him. I left the progress of events to do that. He wanted to
have a look over our ship. So I ushered him aft to my cabin, and
threw open the door. He took a step forward and recoiled. On the
walls were pictures of the Kaiser, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Von
Tirpitz, and a large German flag.
"_Des allemands!_" he groaned.
"Yes," I said, "we are Germans."
"Then we are lost, _per Dieu_!"
"Yes, _per Dieu_, you are lost."
He stood with his forehead in one hand. His despair was both tragic
and comic to behold. I tried as best I could to say a few words of
cheer.
"Well, Captain, you are not the only one to lose your ship during the
war. To-morrow I, too, may be sunk, or the next day."
He replied in the most doleful tone imaginable.
"It is not so much the loss of my ship. But it's that I feel I have
only myself to blame for it. In Valparaiso, where I lay in port with
my _Dupleix_, two of my fellow captains warned me not to start until
they had cabled our owners for final instructions and news about
U-boats and cruisers. Possibly our owners would instruct us to keep
off the usual course, they said. But the wind was fair, and I
thought it best to take advantage of it. So, without waiting for a
reply from our owners, I sailed from Valparaiso ahead of the other
two captains. And now, because I did not take their advice, I have
lost the _Dupleix_, my ship. _Mon Dieu_, what an ass I was! Now
they will report it to my owners, and I will never get a ship again."
"What were the names of your friends' ships?"
"The _Antonin_----"
"The _Antonin_ under Captain Lecoq?"
"Yes. And the _La Rochefoucauld_?"
"Orderly," I called in German, which the captain did not understand,
"bring up captains numbers five and nine."
While we waited, I invited my mournful guest to have some more
champagne, but he refused and continued holding his head and moaning.
A knock at the door.
"Come in."
And in walked the captains of the _Antonin_ and the _La
Rochefoucauld_. They had been on board ten and three days
respectively.
The captain of the _Dupleix_ gaped.
"_Eh, tout la France!_" he cried.
Full of ironical enthusiasm, he raised his glass of champagne and
saluted them. Then with joy that he made no effort to conceal, he
clasped the hands of the two captains whose advice he had scorned and
who had encountered the same fate as he. They returned his welcome
with a grim humour.
The presence of these three captains aboard the _Seeadler_
represented a loss of ten thousand tons of saltpetre destined for
French powder mills, and a saving of hundreds, perhaps thousands of
German lives.
* * *
One Sunday morning, we sighted a large British barque and started
after her. She thought we were playfully challenging her to a race,
and tried to run away. I don't know whether we could have caught her
in a straight sailing ship against sailing ship contest; at any rate,
our motor gave us the edge.
A strange feeling came over me as we gained on her and as her lines
became more distinct. It was a sense of sadness and of vague, dimly
dawning recollection. Had I seen that ship before? Was it
possible...
"Signal and ask her for her name," I called.
Our signal flag went aloft. The reply came back:
"_Pinmore_"
Ah, my old _Pinmore_, on which I had made the longest and most
harrowing voyage of my life. Memories swept over me of those endless
storms and of the disease on board, beri-beri, scurvy. My whole
being seemed to leap back to the days of my youth. Homesickness
seized me. I could not say a word to Leudemann, who stood beside me.
"No use, the ship must be sunk," a harsh inner voice told me.
It was hard for me to sink any sailing vessel, but doubly cruel to
have to sink my old ship. I felt as though she were a kind of
mother. No sailor with any kind of sailor's soul in him will raise a
hand against his own ship.
We took her as we had taken the others. When her crew came aboard, I
looked for familiar faces. There were none. The skipper, Captain
Mullen, came up to me with a humorous, seamanly air.
"Well, Captain, our hard luck is your good luck."
"Lucky?" I felt like saying. "Do you call this lucky?"
He was a typical old seaman, afraid neither of enemy in war nor
storms at sea. The seven seas had been his home. Like the sailing
ship, the old-time windjammer captain is vanishing. Captain Mullen
was indeed like the king of a vanishing race. He swaggered down
below, and saluted our other skippers with a jovial air. He soon
became the leading figure of the "Captains' Club."
When everyone had left the _Pinmore_, I had a boat take me over to
her. I clambered aboard and sent the boat and its crew back, telling
them I would give them a hail when I wanted them again.
"Why does the Count want to remain alone aboard her?" I heard one of
them say.
I went to the fo'c'sle. There was my bunk, the same old bunk where I
had slept night after night for months and had tumbled out countless
times at the command "all hands on deck" while those endless storms
bore down upon us. I paced the planks on deck where I had stood
watch so often. It seemed as though I had never seen that deck save
in a storm. Those gales had left so deep an imprint on my memory
that it gave me a sense of strangeness to see the sun shining on the
_Pinmore's_ planks and a slowly heaving sea around.
I remembered a cunning little cat I had once owned on board her. The
captain's wife wanted it. The steward got it for her. I told the
steward that if he did not bring it back to me I would go to the
captain. The steward laughed at me. I determined to complain to the
captain about the steward and his wife and demand my cat back. I
could see myself as I had wrathfully strode along the deck to the
cabin. The sight of the door made me stop. I mustered up my courage
and advanced again. I ventured just far enough to peep in at the
door, which was ajar. The skipper was sitting there reading a paper.
One glimpse of the master, and all of Phelax Luedige's bravery oozed
away. He turned and tiptoed away. I never did get my cat back, and
forever after held a grudge against the steward.
I could still feel the old enmity. If I could have found that
steward, I would have let him know how the end of a rope felt. I
went to the cabin and half opened the door. It was much as when I
had seen it last. The bright rainbow glow of the coloured skylight
gave me an old familiar feeling. Something restrained me from
entering. I did not dare go in then. I would not now.
At the stern I looked for my name which I had once carved on the
rail. I found it, half effaced by time and weather. I read it
slowly, spelling it out as a child spells its first lessons:
P-H-E-L-A-X L-U-E-D-I-G-E. I looked at the compass, beside which I
had watched for hours. The compass is a sacred place to a sailor.
"This ship," I thought, "carried me safely. The storms were wild all
the way from 'Frisco around the Horn to Liverpool. They wanted to
take us, every man aboard, but the good old _Pinmore_ fought against
wind and wave over leagues and leagues of dreary waste and brought us
safely to port. Yes, she was our mother, our kindly protecting
mother."
The deserted ship with an unguided helm rolled back and forth. The
rigging creaked and groaned. It seemed to be a voice, a voice that
hurt me. Every spar seemed to say:
"So here you are, Phelax, back again. Where have you been all these
years? Where is all the crew? What do you want here, alone? What
are you going to do with me?"
Little had I dreamed when I was a sailor on this fine barque that one
day I would walk her decks again, not as a seaman, but as the
commander of a raider.
Returning to the _Seeadler_, I shut myself up in my cabin. In the
distance I heard the roar of a bomb, and I knew that my old _Pinmore_
had started on her last cruise.